The FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such data to a national security court last year – a 1,000-percent increase from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show.

The FBI’s increased use of the Patriot Act’s “business records” provision — and the wide ranging scope of its requests — is getting new scrutiny in light of last week’s disclosure that that the provision was used to obtain a top-secret national security order requiring telecommunications companies to turn over records of millions of telephone calls.

Taken together, experts say, those revelations show the government has broadly interpreted the Patriot Act provision as enabling it to collect data not just on specific individuals, but on millions of Americans with no suspected terrorist connections. And it shows that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court accepted that broad interpretation of the law.

“That they were using this (provision) to do mass collection of data is definitely the biggest surprise,” said Robert Chesney, a top national security lawyer at the University of Texas Law School. “Most people who followed this closely were not aware they were doing this. We’ve gone from producing records for a particular investigation to the production of all records for a massive pre-collection database. It’s incredibly sweeping.”

****ing terrorists have caused this shit. They want us to lose our constitutional rights and are succeding. I can't wait to play Cowboys and Muslims !

No, we cause it by the pussification of our society. We don't use certain tactics in fear of offending someone. We leave our borders more or less wide open yet claim we have to spy on everyone for security.

Look at what happened in Boston. The Police went into a para-military form and damn near took over the city.

Is it hard to protect freedoms and still get the bad guys? **** yeah! But that's the challenge we have to rise too.

This smear campaign over Snowden is total bullshit. I am watching a guy right now call him a "punk" and "loser".

Meanwhile our government is taking advantage of us in just about every way, every day.